The Current12:16Louise Penny cancels U.S. book tour over Trump’s threats
Canadian novelist Louise Penny says the decision to cancel her U.S. dates for an upcoming book tour didn’t take long to make.
“It was immediate,” Penny told The Current‘s host Matt Galloway. “I just realized that when Trump brought in the 25 per cent tariffs that I … couldn’t enter a country that had declared war on us.”
Penny first announced the decision to scrap the U.S. dates for her forthcoming book called The Black Wolf — including the launch, which was set to take place at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. — last week in a Facebook post. It will be the first time in 20 years, she says, that one of her tours won’t include stops south of the border.
“I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but given the ongoing threat of an unprovoked trade war against Canada by the U.S. president, I do not feel I can enter the United States,” she wrote in part.
While she says she regrets the impact it will have on American fans, travelling to the U.S. while fellow Canadians are facing “ruin” would have felt hypocritical.
Penny told Galloway why she thought it was important to do her part to help Canada in the trade war, and how a plot point in her forthcoming book is now more relevant than ever. Here is part of their conversation.
You wrote also last week, “So the tariffs have come in. Support for Ukraine paused. What’s next? Who’s next?” How do you understand this moment?
Things are coming at us so quickly, it’s hard to grasp, isn’t it?
The tariffs and then that obscene event in the Oval Office happened. And then USAID and women’s rights…. It’s such a parade of shame.
I’ve been thinking about Martin Niemöller. The … Lutheran pastor in the Second World War who wrote [the poem First They Came].
WATCH: More Canadian vacationers skipping U.S. amid trade tensions
That’s what I see happening now. I don’t think, Matt, there is a single country that has ever been invaded, a single people who haven’t been targeted, a single individual who hasn’t been rounded up, who hasn’t looked back and wondered what they missed.… What moment, what window was there where this could have been stopped?
There’s no belief in me that my … declaring grandly that I’m not going to the States and we’ve cancelled the tour is going to change anything. But … I can guarantee you, if we are silent, nothing is going to change.
There are people and many, many Americans who have said this is a brave stance and that they support you. And then there are people who say that they read you because they want to be taken out of the world that we’re in right now, and they’re not interested in political views, and they don’t want to hear those political views.
Well, then they can go elsewhere.
I don’t see this as political, really. I see this as moral. I see it as ethical, which has no boundaries. If the Biden administration had done the same thing, I would have reacted in exactly the same way.
As I said in the post, this is a moral wound, and it’s up to us now to stand up and do something.
[The tour] will end at a very specific place, which is in many ways symbolic of that border between Canada and the United States. This is the Haskell Free Library and Opera House that’s right on the border between Quebec and Vermont.
Yeah, it’s an extraordinary place. It was built more than 100 years ago by the two communities, the United States and Canada, as a symbol…. There’s a [border] line drawn straight through the opera house and free library.
[The library] is symbolic of this friendship, a really important friendship between the two nations. And I would love for Americans to come to this event, and Canadians, and do what Trump is trying to destroy and to prove that he can’t.
It cannot be undone, the friendship, the profound friendship between these two nations.
This book is coming out in the fall, and am I getting this correct? That there is some hint of … this 51st state business?
It’s hard to believe, but yes.
I wrote the book The Black Wolf a year ago. And in it … part of the plot [is about] what happens when a certain group decides that Canada should become the 51st state because of our resources, because of the wealth that we have in minerals and in oil and water. What happens when the nation to the south is running out of all those things, particularly water, and sees what we have?
But you know, Matt, I have to say, my fear when I wrote that was, “have I gone too far? Are people going to believe this?” And now, obviously, I don’t think I’ve gone far enough.
